How To Save Money With A PPC Audit

How would you, the advertiser, benefit from a PPC audit? The personal benefit is largely dependent on Google and what they receive from Pay Per Click. Depending on where you get your figures, I have seen information online that Google is going to make somewhere around 14 Billion dollars in 2013. The information may be a bit off, so for arguments sake, lets say that we are plus or minus 10 Billion (with a B). So Google is going to make between 10 and 25 Billion dollars this year. Do you know how much of that money is made from Pay per click advertising? How about 95 to 97%. All from PPC advertising.

This is extremely important to those of us who spend the vast majority of our time working on optimizing websites for organic searches. Writing content, optimizing pages, and making sure that Google authorship is present are just a couple of the things you must do in order to rank well organically on the search engines. But what if you are spending money on Pay per click, and seeing some good results? Does it mean that if you have a 2 to 1 ROI on your money spent that you are completely optimized for pay per click? Probably not. I wanted to share a few things that you can do to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck with Google pay per click. As well as some things you can do on your own to improve the cost you pay per click.

Understanding Quality Score with Pay-Per-Click

Before we get too involved, we need to make sure that you have a pretty good understanding of how quality score can impact the amount of money that you pay on PPC. Quality Score is the measurement that Google uses to determine the relevance of your pay per click advertisement. If you are selling Adidas golf shoes online, Google wants to see that everything about your advertisement relates to Adidas golf shoes. There are multiple sources for this information, you can find a lot of companies offering PPC audit training, PPC audit guides, or you may even purchase some fancy PPC audit software. All of them will show the exact same thing. The Big G wants to see:

The Headline of your ad has Adidas Golf Shoes in it.

The text related to the advertisement has Adidas Golf Shoes in it.

The display URL that you are promoting has Adidas Golf Shoes in it.

The landing page that people will visit has content on it concerning Adidas Golf shoes in it.

Google’s goal is the provide you with the most relevant advertisement or organic listing it possibly can, so all of the factors above play a great role in determining which ads are shown, and what price the advertiser is paying. If you meet all of the factors above, you can expect to see a very good quality score. Google is going to reward advertisers for creating relevant ads with a high quality score. Likely in the 7 through 10 range. This is very important, because it determines how much money you will pay for your advertisement. I know what you are thinking….It is pay per click. If I pay more than everyone else, then I am going to rank #1 on the PPC ads. Nope, it doesn’t work that way. Let’s explore this a bit further.

Paying More With PPC Advertising

So what happens to your quality score if you miss a few things along the way? Maybe instead of a landing page with Adidas golf shoes, you direct someone to a page with Nike Golf Shirts on it. Will Google be providing the most RELEVANT advertisement if they provide a page with Nike apparel on it? Not at all. So, they are going to punish your advertisement by lowering your Quality Score. When the PPC Quality Score goes down, you pay more for your spot on Adwords. Same goes for the Headline, Text in the ad, display URL, and a few other factors. Everything needs to match perfectly in order to get a high quality score.

How Much Does Quality Score Impact What You Pay on Adwords?

The quality score of your Ads on Google is a multiplier to determine how much money you are going to pay for each one of your advertisements. If you have a high Quality Score, you will pay less for your ad. Here is an example.

Advertiser #1 has a quality score of 10 and they are willing to pay a maximum of $5 per click. If you multiply 10 x 5, you can say that advertiser #1 has a score of 50 for their ad.

Advertiser #2 is trying to promote his Nike Shirts on an Adidas Ad, and only has a quality score of 5. However, Advertiser #2 is willing to pay a maximum of $8 for his advertisement. So advertiser #2 has a score of 40.

Guess Who Is Going To Show Up On Top Of Google Adwords?

Yep, advertiser #1 is going to pay less per click than advertiser #2, and he is going to get higher rankings. Do you see how important the Quality Score is when creating your ads? The same can be said for the Bing Quality Score.

How A PPC Audit Can Help You Improve Quality Score

At Hit Me SEO, we not only help people get to the top of the organic rankings, but we also manage Pay per click advertising on Google and Bing. We have clients that spend big bucks on PPC, and we are able to show them a great return on their investment. We have one client that is making more than 3 to 1 ROI on their investment. Is it any wonder they started off spending a few thousand per month, and are now spending 10’s of thousands each month? If you could spend 1 dollar and make 3, how much would you invest in your online advertising with PPC?

The audit that we provide to our clients comes in two forms. The first is a mini audit, where we break down about 12 different factors that determine your quality score and what you pay online per click. We look for factors like:

Having Google Analytics on your website

Calls to Actions on all of your ads

Having a privacy policy on your website

Making sure that you utilize a display URL

Maximizing ROI through Remarketing

Obviously, there is a bit more that goes into this mini audit, but it really gives us a very good idea on how well a PPC campaign is put together.

Once a client sees the value of the mini audit, we move onto a full detailed analysis of the website. In the detailed analysis we review keywords, ad groups, location extensions, site links, discuss the importance of split testing, and so much more.

Call Today for a Free PPC Audit

Managing pay per click is a full time job, and not having a campaign optimized can have a big impact on your bottom line. If you are currently managing your own Adwords account, give us a call. We will be happy to perform a mini audit for you and determine if you are paying too much for your pay per click advertising. Our proprietary PPC audit program will help you save some money and get a higher return on your investment. Call today for our free PPC audit.